Sunday, May 15, 2016

This week president
Maduro decreed a new “State of Constitutional Exception and of Economic
emergency” in order to, according
to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias,
“protect the people from the constant
attacks by the international right, allied with the axis of imperial power.”

“This new decree is
to defeat the coup, the economic war, to socially stabilize our country and to
face the current national and international threats against our country. (…)
Venezuela is in this moment under international threat. Today (…) there was a
conspiracy meeting against Venezuela (in which Colombian) ex-president Álvaro
Uribe has asked for the intervention of international armies against Venezuela,”
said
Maduro.

The emergency decree
has not yet been published and its details are unknown. However Maduro
explained that it will extend for another 60 days the already existing
economic emergency decree, only now the executive will have “wider political powers.”

According
to REUTERS, U.S. intelligence officials warned this week that “one ‘plausible’ scenario would be that
Maduro’s own party or powerful political figures would force him out and would
not rule out the possibility of a military coup. Still, they said there was no
evidence of any active plotting or that he had lost support from the country’s
generals.”

But REUTERS also
quotes the official's concern about accusations by the Venezuelan government of U.S.-aided
conspiracies against the country: “The
officials appeared to acknowledge that Washington has little leverage in how
the situation unfolds in Venezuela, where any U.S. role draws government
accusations of U.S.-aided conspiracies. Instead, the administration of
President Barack Obama wants "regional" efforts to help keep the
country from sliding into chaos.”

Sunday, May 8, 2016

President Maduro has
said that after “two days of combat” the police killed two criminal gang
leaders known as “El Picure” and “El Topo.” He also said that opposition
leaders have links to the criminal gangs that operate in the south of the
country.

El Topo was the main
suspect behind the Tumeremo
massacre in early March. Maduro said that the opposition deputy Américo De
Grazia should be investigated because of the timing in which he denounced the
massacre. “The people arrested are talking, and there are more than one
right-wing deputies [involved.] There was one deputy writing on twitter on real
time at the same time the massacre was happening,” said
Maduro referring to De Grazia.

Before Maduro,
Interior Minister Gustavo González López had already declared
that the opposition had links with El Topo and his criminal gang. “We discovered
that there are links with political groups of the right in Bolivar state.”
According to González López El Topo’s gang was part of an opposition plot to affect
the “Mining Arch,” the government’s latest mining project, and to “link the
Venezuelan state to situations of violence.”

Deputy Américo De
Grazia was the first to report that a massacre had occurred near the mining
town of Tumeremo. He answered the recent government accusations by
claiming that the Interior Minister is trying to justify the Mining Arch
and its negative effects on the environment and the people of the region.

Since the first
reports came out about the Tumeremo massacre, the government has made similar
accusations against De Grazia and other opposition leaders. Ruling party’s
governor of Bolivar, Francisco Rangel Gómez, first denied that the massacre had
ever occurred, but then said
that it was “all part of a political game-play by the right that is receiving funds
from illegal mining in the area.”